Jobless Future?

A recent article posted by Vivek Wadhwa, “We’re heading into a jobless future no matter what the government does discussed the reality that we’re heading into a jobless future and expecting the government to solve this problem is a waste of time. Things are now changing so fast, there’s no way any system can manage this because those in the system are barely aware of it themselves.

His writing corroborates what we’ve written here in an Integrative Economy and also what Jeremy Rifkin wrote about in “Zero Marginal Cost Society”. With robots, technology and less and less need for humans to do drudgery work, there will be a huge amount of humans and not enough work to keep them employed for 40 hours a week. Many people panic when they see this but they don’t have to. This is a good thing but I say that with one caveat. As we change the world economy, we will need to ensure that every human achieves their full capacity development so they can participate and take responsibility for being a part of the new economy. And this is the major work of the next twenty years–human capacity development–teaching people to create whole and dynamic lives.

Too often I see these articles and they get all excited about machines doing everything and making ‘humans’ obsolete. But we have to remember one very vital thing–an economy is only necessary if we have humans because an “economy is the management of life”. And since robots aren’t alive–they don’t need an economy. Humans do and it is our creativeness that has gotten us now to the point that we can create a quality of life economy–where humans use their highest potential and machines do the repetitive work that held us captive for thousands of years.